In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

12 February, 1999

Iris Murdoch was not only a former student of Wittgenstein's, the author of the first English-language book on Sartre, and a lecturer on philosophy at Oxford, but also, somehow, the author of 26 romantic/erotic novels. When she died on Monday [February 8, 1999], the American media didn't know what to make of her. Most obituaries overlooked her insights and focused on her real-life adultery and Elegy for Iris, the lyrical yet creepy semi-posthumous memoir written by her husband John Bayley after she'd contracted Alzheimer's. Martin Amis, barely concealing his contempt for interviewers, said his countrywoman had a "luminous intelligence," and that her often melodramatic novels were "underscored by real brain." So if Murdoch was so smart, why haven't we heard more about her by now? Perhaps because, in an intellectual culture devoted to debunking and deconstructing, the brilliant Dame Iris preferred to talk about love.

Unlike, say, Ayn Rand, whose novels are populated by cartoonish figures constantly explicating the author's ideas, Murdoch insisted that philosophy and literature are separate activities—the one a strictly rational activity, the other a rational activity which draws upon the unconscious as well. In books like The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch argues—against existentialists, and later deconstructionists—that every person is a unique and unified center of value and significance. And against utilitarians she insisted that the moral life demands that we de-center ourselves by seeking the Good through pleasure: specifically, love and the act of love. Literature, she suggested, is meant "to be grasped by enjoyment," and the pleasure of writing, or reading, a "jolly good yarn" can itself be a kind of decentering moral practice.

"Love," Murdoch insisted, "is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." A self-described neo-Platonist, she believed that we are trapped in an isolated state of illusion, from which only the experience of personal erotic love can release us. Novels like The Bell, The Black Prince, and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine sympathetically portray what one Murdochian scholar describes as "the many stratagems by which the ego wraps itself in a cozy self-serving fog that prevents egress to the reality of the other."

As we know from Elegy for Iris, Murdoch practiced what she preached. Right up until the moment she was afflicted with Alzheimer's, and was reduced to singing along with the Teletubbies, she surrendered to the magnetic pull of the Good, engaging in one adulterous affair after another. Love which seeks to grasp and own its object, she'd always argued, is not true love. This sentiment makes Bayley's claim—that until his wife's disease transformed her into a child, he'd never really possessed her—seem less a failing on her part than on his. As Valentine's Day, in all its saccharine glory, approaches menacingly, let's pause to remember the woman who insisted that "intense mutual erotic love... presents itself as such a dizzyingly lofty value that even to speak of 'enjoying' it seems a sacrilege." Try fitting that on a candy heart!

24 February, 1999

"Key Conservative Surrenders in Culture War," shouted headlines late last week. Dismayed by Clinton's acquittal, right-wing icon Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Moral Majority, confessed in an open letter to his colleagues that "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values." Unlike punch-drunk GOP-ers, who just don't know when to quit, Weyrich has made up his mind: now that American values apparently need protecting from, well, Americans, "We need to drop out of this culture." For starters, he'd like everyone to kill their televisions and start home-schooling. The spectacle of counter-cultural formulae being mouthed by a counter-counter-cultural Republican is ironic, to be sure. But the true irony is the sad fact—made obvious to anyone who's seen Vanity Fair's 85th anniversary issue—that the so-called "culture wars" have been over for years, and everybody has lost.

In 1976, the same year Weyrich helped convince Jerry Falwell to head up the Moral Majority, neoconservative sociologist Daniel Bell published The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which argued that the "counter-culture" (a term he found laughable) could not be blamed for eroding American values. Much as he disliked hippies, it was apparent to Bell that the bourgeois economic system—the free market—had already introduced "a radical individualism in economics, and a willingness to tear up all traditional social relations in the process." A society of mass consumption, whose mainstream culture prioritizes personal transformation and gratification over hard work and morality, is the inevitable result of the very policies advocated by those same people now lamenting the fact that our culture has "collapsed" and become an "ever-wider sewer." A counter-cultural icon like Rimbaud, whose last great dream was "to have at least one son, whom I could spend the rest of my life bringing up according to my own ideas," could have told Weyrich that they'd been on the same side of the culture wars all along.

On the other side: Vanity Fair. In a special section of the March issue, which celebrates the 85th anniversary of its original (1914-1936) incarnation, the magazine manages simultaneously to congratulate itself for having once championed avant-garde artists—e.e. cummings, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein—and to pat itself on the back for having learned, when publisher Condé Nast was finally forced to fold the failing enterprise into Vogue, that aestheticism just doesn't pay. In her introduction to the section, Amy Fine Collins praises founding editor Frank Crowninshield for having had the courage to reproduce works by Matisse and Picasso before any (other) mainstream magazine dared... but suggests that Crowninshield just didn't care enough about what the advertisers wanted.

This is obviously no longer a problem at Vanity Fair, since the special section celebrating the magazine's relatively ad-free past is absolutely choked with advertising. Edward Steichen's moody 1929 portrait of Greta Garbo, which graces the special section's "cover," for example, turns out to be part of a fold-out featuring retro-modern hepcats cavorting in Mossimo duds, and it just gets worse from there. If it's true, as Weyrich would have it, that our culture is fast "approaching barbarism," it's not because ordinary Americans don't care what the President does with his penis. It's because the magazines they buy aren't ashamed to juxtapose photos of a free spirit like Louise Brooks with Lincoln Navigator ads urging us to "Kick derrière."

Josh Glenn, the editor of Hermenaut, is a contributing editor to the Web site FEED. These "journal entries" originally appeared, in a different format, there.